IT, Documentation, and Bookkeeping

The maintenance logs produced by GWCheck can give you a good indication of the health of your GroupWise Post Office as well as the clues to fix any problems that it can't on its own. Whether a GWCheck was run manually or in an automated fashion, the 'executive summary' is at the very end that sums up what it has achieved and any problems it dealt with.

Of course if you have all the jobs automated, a collection of them can be a handful, so the first step is to add a find results folder (File, New, Folder.., Find results folder) that only looks in your gwcheck lots collection point, with an Advanced Find of 'Attachments' []contains 'Contents' AND 'Attachments' []contains 'Verify', which will make finding those content checks easier to find. Ideally the subject of the message should say something about which job was run, so if you agree, please go vote for the Idea.

The first section after "JOB LOG SUMMARY" will be user users with lots of mail if you've selected "Collect Statistics" in your Contents check. Make sure the numbers match your perception of reality and if not look at adjusting either the reality or your perceptions to match. Specially watch for the 'Wastebasket' as there is generally no point in keeping the trash. If the Wastebaskets are getting 'full', either the applicable maintenance is not running, or your backup and/or archival system is having issues updating the applicable flags.

Under "OVERALL STATS FOR THIS RUN" is where the Errors you need to look at and the Problems you should monitor are summarized.

The Micro Focus wiki has some useful compilations of the Errors and Problems.

Some of these 'conditions' are normal house cleaning and will almost always be present, where as others are an issue if they persist and should then be looked into.

Example of a healthy Structural Analyze/Fix

***** OVERALL STATS FOR THIS RUN *****
*********************************************************************
Uncorrectable conditions encountered:
 - No problems found
Correctable conditions encountered:
 CODE DESCRIPTION COUNT
---- --------------------------------------------------  -----
  39 Unrecognized or invalid files in mail directories..     3
  66 GWCheck log files in log directory.................     3
*********************************************************************

Example of a healthy Contents Analyze/Fix

***** OVERALL STATS FOR THIS RUN *****
*********************************************************************
Uncorrectable conditions encountered:
 - No problems found
Correctable conditions encountered:
 CODE DESCRIPTION COUNT
---- --------------------------------------------------  -----
  39 Unrecognized or invalid files in mail directories..     3
  67 Outdated execution records.(notify/alarm)..........   176
  66 GWCheck log files in log directory.................   134
  93 Unused blob files (deleted)........................  3058
*********************************************************************

If you run either Analyze/Fix twice in a row, you will generally see the numbers for these particular problems go way down and possibly go away all together, but they will be back. Basically treat these as 'emptying the trashbin' processes. Only if these numbers keep climbing up should they be investigated. If you see any other errors, first just note if they are gone on the next regular run, or look back on older GWChecks to see if those problems were occurring previously. For persistent problems other than 39,66,67,&93, I often create a simple spread sheet with the problems listed down column A, the dates of the checks for the rest of the columns, and fill in the numbers so I can track these error from before I started, until I get them cleaned up (yes it can take a few cycles of contents checks before issues are fully dealt with). Below is an example of one system I was working on where you can see how some errors were steadily cleared up.

Error/
Problem# week04 week03 week02 week01 week218
   83      712    712    712    712
   30        1
   37        0     20
   39        8      6      0      4
   52        0      2      0      1
   66        2      2      2      2      3
   67     1626   1640   1754   1707   1083
   78       12     43      9     13
   79        9      9      9      9      1
   93     1091   1079    992   1027    935
  102       34     35     39     35      1

Clearly I have to first look into Error 83 and Problems 78, 79, & 102 as they are persistent issues. Problems 30, 37, & 52 are intermittent, so we leave them for now as they may clear through the normal process and by cleaning the persistent issues.
Next step is to now look at the particular instances. First look up the Error/Problem starting in this Mirco Focus wiki page and Google as needed. We dive in by opening two contents GWCheck results(eg. Week01 & Week04) and search (Edit, Find text... F2) for Error 83. I see that in this instance, the error are identical instances in both GWChecks, clustered on just a few users. Further investigation shows that these users don't currently have access to their GW Archive directory and we initiate corrective measures. We go back to the top of each GWCheck (actually click in the top of the GWCheck) and do this again with for Problem 78, where I see that they are all different instances but all from the same set of external non-human senders, so we don't need to worry about these. Problem 79 are the same each week and aren't being cleared. Schedule some runs of GWCheck, on Contents, for the applicable User DB, with the Misc switch "DelDupFolders. Problem 102 turns out to mostly be system/role/device accounts that we just need to get into and add an address book entry to make happy.

A way to quickly see who has a given error is to grep the GWCheck results with a command such as
   grep -E 'Checking user|Problem 102' gwcheck.log >prob102.txt
or similarly in PowerShell with
   Select-String -Path .\gwcheck.log -Pattern "Checking user|Problem 102" >prob102.txt

So as you see we come out of that analysis with a set of action items that we can now farm out to the appropriate people, and before long, the contents checks should look a whole lot cleaner and this system be that much healthier. Just follow this basic process for your system based on your GWChecks, and away you can go to having a healthy system. If this is too much for you at this time, you can also readily outsource this to organizations such as Konecny Consulting Inc, so feel free to engage us

Occasionally we come across a system that hasn't had a GWCheck run on it for a long time, and some times we come across those that have real problems. The amazing thing is how well GroupWise does still keep running in the worst of cases as we see in this example of a 150 user PostOffice that hasn't seen a proper maintenance run in almost two years that my friend Servman got to fix up. Others have seen similar, so perhaps we can collect such 'horror' stories here: - Jerry G's in 2015 -